Abstract
In Australia since about the turn of the millennium, discrimination against Muslims has been increasingly normalized, made respectable, and presented as prudent precaution against violent extremism. Vilification of Muslims has posed as defending ‘Australian values’ against those who will not integrate. Liberal political leaders and press leader-writers who formerly espoused cultural pluralism now routinely hold up as inimical the Muslim folk devil by whose otherness the boundaries of acceptability of the national culture may be marked out and policed. The Muslim Other is positioned not only as culturally incommensurate, but dangerously so: dishonest, criminally inclined, violent, misogynist, homophobic, backward, uncivilized. On the far right, extremist nationalist organizations incite racist hatred under cover of this rhetoric, often cloaked as reasonable common sense. This paper undertakes an ideology analysis of political and media discussion, and examines the forms of social control that they advance and sustain.
Highlights
In July 2018 the Murdoch broadsheet, The Australian, reported on an address given by Australia’sCitizenship Minister, Alan Tudge, in what was described as ‘a landmark speech to a closed meeting of the Australia/UK Leadership Forum in London’ (Benson 2018, p. 1; Tudge 2018)
Intellectuals organic to the ruling class take up elements of this common sense, render them more authoritative and coherent as a worldview, and propagate them in this form to the ‘masses’, adhering them to the agendas of the leading class fractions, as if these were in accord with their own interests
Before moving to discussing right-wing extremism and institutional Islamophobia in detail, we provide background by locating the present within the context of post-colonial racism in Australia
Summary
He warned that Australia was veering toward a separatist multicultural model In many ways, this large front-page spread, in a newspaper whose target group is an educated elite, is unremarkable, given the ‘values’ rhetoric emerging from the federal government and the Murdoch media onslaught against Muslims. This large front-page spread, in a newspaper whose target group is an educated elite, is unremarkable, given the ‘values’ rhetoric emerging from the federal government and the Murdoch media onslaught against Muslims This previously included a 2015 campaign described as ‘an open-minded but unflinching series of articles analysing Muslim Australia’ (The Australian 2015). What was previously identified as the ‘creeping blight’ of Islamophobia in Australia (Briskman 2015) is institutionalized and taken for granted, endangering democratic principles, cultural pluralism, and the rule of law
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